Chess Fever

D. T. Max’s article in the magazine this week about the young Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen brought up a painful riot of memories. I played lots of chess as a child and through adolescence, largely due to the electrifying personal influence of one childhood friend, whose story, as it turns out, is a horrifying mystery.

Peter Winston is the only true, epochal genius I’ve ever met; we became friends at the age of five, in 1963, in first grade at Sands Point Academy, a now-defunct private school on Long Island. It was a school for academically talented children, but Peter was off the charts, head and shoulders above anyone else I met there. While we were still in the first grade, he was the subject of a lengthy profile in the Saturday Evening Post which emphasized both his amazing mathematical skills and his all-around intelligence. (I’m an unnamed co-conspirator in the piece—the author reports on Peter’s debate with a classmate about the existence of God; I was that classmate.) Our fathers took us together to the Museum of Natural History (his father, a chemist, died when Peter was about seven or eight). I don’t remember exactly how old he was when he started taking chess seriously; I learned the moves at age seven (thanks to my cousin Cynthia) and Peter and I started playing soon thereafter; he trounced me, and even defeated me handily when giving me queen odds (i.e., starting the game without his queen, the most powerful piece).

I remember the way he spoke—clearly, assertively, intensely, with a lilt of impatient sarcasm inflecting his far-seeing assertions—and he was sublimely insolent, which most of the teachers found endurable, or even endearing (but one, who used to threaten Peter with his paperweight, shouting “Winston, I’m going to hurl this rock through your skull!,” was fired mid-year), and I remember what he ate for lunch, every day: several slices of salami, wrapped in tin foil, without bread, and a banana. Peter was very much a well-rounded kid. He took part in the daily recess soccer games and was as much of a sports nut as I was (I remember our lists—we ranked baseball players, football players, hockey players, and even professional golfers, based on our reading of the sports section and Sports Illustrated, as well as our TV viewing). But as soon as he touched chess, he blessed the game and vice versa, and rapidly became a major tournament player.

By the time we all (“our gang” of friends who had been together since the first grade) left the school, after the sixth grade, it was clear that chess would be a crucial part of Peter’s destiny, and so it was. He and I fell out of touch, but I kept playing the game, too--at a much lower level, and, playing in tournaments and reading the publications, was well aware of Peter’s great successes, which led to his becoming U. S. Junior Champion at the age of sixteen.

I lost track of Peter, and, recently trying to figure out what he ended up doing, stumbled upon a dark hole of accounts, published on the Internet, about his having disappeared in January, 1978—and not having been seen since. Several conflicting versions of the time leading up to his final sighting—after a disastrous tournament—have been offered, involving mental illness, drug use, rehabilitation, or simple poor judgment (he was last seen heading out of doors, without I.D., in a strong snowstorm); in any case, his later years—which is to say, his adolescence, because, in January, 1978, he wasn’t yet twenty—were apparently not happy ones, despite his accomplishments in the game of chess. The world at large is much poorer for his absence, as am I. Tomorrow would have been his fifty-third birthday.

Peter Winston played a role in a famous chess event. When Shelby Lyman called the Marshall Chess Club during the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match, the analysis he got was sometimes not from Mednis, bur [sic] from Peter Winston and me, sitting in the office. Mednis was an excellent commentator most of the time, but on some days the tactics were literally hanging pieces. So at Peter’s initiative, we often passed on the analysis a small group of players were doing in the office. I can’t remember who else was there, but Peter had taken charge and was running things.

Another commenter at the same site mentions that Peter “wrote a book on tournament play (to be published by Random House)” and adds, “I remember visiting Random House on some personal matters and in the main reception area Peter’s book was displayed nicely amongst other new books.” I’ve never seen a copy.

D. T. Max’s article, and these recent thoughts about Peter, brings to mind my own equivocal relationship with the game of chess. I jokingly describe myself as a “recovering chess player,” and the joke conceals the truth: I spent much too much time on the game, especially as a teen-ager; though I played in tournaments and, at my patzer level, did well in them, I’ve come to think that chess reinforced several of the worst and most dangerous traits of the adolescent—or, in particular, the adolescent-intellectual—character. Chess is a closed and perfect world with a clearly-defined and finite set of rules—the opposite of life, and, for those who become devoted to it, a substitute for life, for exactly that reason. Playing chess in any serious manner is the best way for a young person to avoid facing the sort of complex interpersonal experience that is the most essential kind of learning that’s needed to help a person make his way in the world. I think of the time I spent on chess as worse than a distraction or a waste—a pathological delusion.

I’m reminded of “Black Swan,” the real subject of which is not the torture endured in the interest of art but the lack of experience it takes to deal with the demands—on- and off-stage—of a life in art. There, as in chess, it’s a matter of black and white.